Amidst masked men and paramilitary violence, Ukraine is a country on the jagged edge of anarchy
The men, most with their faces hidden by balaclavas, many carrying baseball bats, some wearing sidearms, swarmed around the black Jeep Patriot. They dragged out the four occupants - in black combat uniforms - snatching their guns, magazines of ammunition, and radio transmitters from their olive rucksacks. Body armour was stripped from the captives, who were forced to kneel on the pavement. The number plates of the car were torn off and it was driven away with screeching tyres.
No one was quite sure just what had taken place at Artema Street in the centre of Donetsk on Tuesday morning. The SUV had been parked outside a branch of the UkrBusinessBank. The staff thought the occupants may have been a "maskashow", armed masked gunmen sent by commercial rivals to disrupt trading, not an infrequent occurrence in the commerce of this wild east.
It emerged that the bank is owned by the dentist son of Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s overthrown president. Serhiy Oksenuik, the deputy chairman, insisted he had no idea what the armed men were after, or if it had anything to do with the financial affairs of Oleksandr Yanukovych, who is reputed to have personal assets of $500 million.
Members of the "self-defence force" arrived; they were unaware, they professed, of the identity of those who had made off with the weapons and the vehicle. “It’s a mystery,” said Aleksandr. He was a berkut, the riot police disbanded by the Kiev administration after a hundred protesters were shot dead in the Maidan, now one of the mainstays of the militia of the People’s Republic of Donetsk.
Read More: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/amidst-masked-men-and-paramilitary-violence-ukraine-is-a-country-on-the-jagged-edge-of-anarchy-9307710.html